About Five Nights at Freddy's

Five Nights at Freddy's is the game that turned a pizza restaurant into one of the most recognisable settings in horror. You play a night security guard hired at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, a family entertainment venue whose animatronic band performs for children during the day. Your shift runs from midnight to 6 AM. You never leave your chair, you never walk a corridor, and you never fight anything. The entire game takes place in one small office, and everything you do is done through a camera tablet, two door buttons and two light buttons.

The threat comes from the animatronics themselves. Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie, Chica and Foxy are left in a free-roaming mode overnight, and they do not distinguish between an intruder and an employee. If one reaches your office and you have not sealed the corresponding door, the night ends. The horror is built almost entirely out of information you cannot get fast enough: the cameras show you where they were, not where they are, and the two doorways are blind unless you switch on the lights beside them.

What makes the design unusual is that every defensive action costs the same finite resource. Closing a door drains power. Turning on a light drains power. Even holding the camera tablet up drains power. You begin each night with a full meter and no way to recharge it, so caution is not free — a player who panics and seals both doors at 1 AM will sit in a dark, powerless office long before dawn. The game is therefore a budgeting exercise wearing a horror costume, and the tension comes from spending as little as possible while still checking often enough to stay alive.

Released in 2014 by Scott Cawthon, the game was built by one developer and became a phenomenon almost immediately, spawning a long series, a film and an enormous body of fan work. Part of that success came from its restraint: the animatronics are barely animated, the office never changes, and the scares are rationed. Playing it now, the thing that stands out is how little the game actually shows you, and how much work your own imagination does in the gaps.

Tips for Five Nights at Freddy's

• Check Pirate Cove more often than anywhere else. Foxy is the only animatronic punished by neglect — the longer you go without looking at him, the sooner he sprints down the west hall, and once he is running a closed door is your only option.
• Use the door lights, not the cameras, to decide whether to close a door. The lights are cheaper and they tell you what is actually standing beside you right now, which is the only fact that matters at that moment.
• Do not hold the camera up while you think. The tablet drains power the whole time it is raised. Open it, read it, close it — treat every glance as something you are paying for.
• Listen for footsteps and for the sound of the kitchen. Audio tells you about movement you have not seen yet, and on later nights it is usually faster than cycling cameras.
• If Freddy laughs and you cannot find him, check the east hall corner light immediately. He approaches from the right and is the hardest of the four to spot on camera because he moves while the room is dark.
• Aim to reach 4 AM with power to spare rather than finishing every night on 1%. A comfortable margin at 4 AM is worth more than perfect camera coverage at 1 AM.

Did you know?

• Every action available to you — doors, lights and the camera tablet — draws from the same power meter, and there is no way to restore it mid-night. The game is a resource-management puzzle presented as a horror game.
• Foxy is the only animatronic whose behaviour rewards frequent observation. The other three are hindered by being watched; Foxy becomes more aggressive the longer he is ignored.
• The cameras show a still image rather than a live feed of the room you are not in, so the information you act on is always slightly out of date by design.
• Scott Cawthon developed the original game alone and released it in 2014. Its low-fidelity animation and static office were constraints of a solo project that became central to the game's atmosphere.